White House starts scrapping pending regulations, including student debt cancellation
President Joe Biden’s administration has started to withdraw pending regulations that won’t be finalized by the time he leaves office
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is abandoning his effort to cancel student loans for more than 38 million Americans, the first step in an administration-wide plan to jettison pending regulations to prevent President-elect Donald Trump from retooling them to achieve his own aims.
The White House expects to pull back unfinished rules across several agencies if there isn’t enough time to finalize them before Trump takes office. If the proposed regulations were left in their current state, the next administration would be able to rewrite them and advance its agenda more quickly.
Even as the Biden administration moves to pull back the rules, it pushed ahead with cancellation through other avenues on Friday. The Education Department said it was clearing loans for another 55,000 borrowers who reached eligibility through a program known as Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which was created by Congress in 2007 and expanded by the Biden administration.
As the pending Biden regulations are withdrawn, nothing prevents Trump from pursuing his own regulations on the same issues when he returns to the White House, but he would have to start from scratch in a process that can take months or even years.
